Raymond Laflamme

Raymond Laflamme (July 19, 1960 to June 19, 2025) was a Canadian theoretical physicist born in Quebec City who became one of the founding figures of quantum computing and quantum error correction. He earned an undergraduate degree from Universite Laval, completed Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge in 1984, and earned his PhD there in 1988 under Stephen Hawking with a dissertation on time and quantum cosmology; his own graduate work helped convince Hawking that time does not reverse in a contracting universe, a finding recounted in A Brief History of Time. After postdoctoral positions including a Killam Fellowship at the University of British Columbia, a research fellowship at Cambridge and an Oppenheimer Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he co-founded and directed the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, established in 2002, stepping down as director in 2017 to hold the John von Neumann Chair in Quantum Information there while also serving as associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and holding a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information. He helped define the Knill-Laflamme conditions describing when a quantum error correcting code can protect against a given set of errors, and in 2005 his group built what was then the world's largest quantum information processor, a twelve-qubit system. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2017, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and of the American Physical Society, and co-authored the textbook An Introduction to Quantum Computing in 2006.